Across the US one can find small towns similar to Mart, satellites from medium sized cities such as Waco. My mother is from one of such teeny towns that feel untouched by modern technology as well as dilapidated. I imagine Mart to be the same way. Is it the town that is so resistant to change or is it its isolation that prevents change from occurring. Probably both.

I looked around at other blogs online to see an insider’s perspective. One blogger, Joanne Steele, believed her town to be resistant to revitalization because of two main reasons. The first was that using outside experts sets up resistance from the beginning. She states, “the normal process toward change is for some organization to get a grant. They hire experts, usually from afar, to come in and assess the current situation and create the plan. They present the community with a picture of how bad things are, with statistics to prove it, and offer a solution that is often brilliant, expensive and a little hard for locals to wrap their thinking around. Then they leave… and the plan is shelved, never to be seen again.” While I’ve never had first hand experience with this situation, I agree that this is probably the case for most places. Insider input is critical to the adoption of these new revitalization ideas. It seems to me that the Mart revitalization project has done better in this aspect because the locals are quite involved with the changes occurring and understand the slow process of revitalization.

Steele’s second reason that resistance occurs is because the wrong people are involved in the planning process. In small towns, residents are often so involved with their one aspect of the town, for example the Garden Club maintains the park, that these volunteers are already too busy with maintaining their small part of the town that they can’t handle another, even larger change.

To have successful revitalization, perhaps it would take a small team of volunteers from the community who come from many social groups of the town. This small team would get input from their clubs/church/friends and act as their liaison. Maybe at the head of this group a planner or consultant can give advice throughout the process, but not directly interact with the town as a whole.